What Jiclo is
Jiclo is an assistant that finds things, prices them and completes the purchase. You put money on a Jiclo balance first. When you buy something, Jiclo places the order with a supplier and charges your balance for it.
We are in the middle of the transaction, not beside it. The order goes to the supplier under our account, not yours. Your card is never handed to the shop or the hotel. That is a deliberate design and it has a consequence worth stating at the top: the money sits with us for the time it is on your balance, and when something goes wrong with a purchase your first conversation is with us rather than with a merchant you have never heard of.
Today Jiclo buys physical goods through Zinc and books hotel stays through LiteAPI. Those are the suppliers, and what they can and cannot do is part of what you get.
These terms are the agreement between you and Spotbo, Inc., operating Jiclo within VCorp. Using the product means you accept them. If you do not, do not add money to a balance.
Who may use Jiclo
You must be at least 18 and able to enter a contract. You must give us a real name and a working email, and you must verify a phone number before anything you do can cost money.
Jiclo ships to addresses in the United States and nowhere else. A stay can be booked at a property outside the United States, but the account itself, its address and its payment method are United States only for now.
Accounts are released by hand at the moment, and the release gates money rather than the front door. A new account can sign in, talk to the assistant, search and look at what things cost. It cannot get a firm price, place an order, cancel or return one, or take money back out until somebody here has released it, and there is no automatic approval you can trigger by paying. If you are waiting, write to us.
One person, one account, and the account is yours to look after. What happens under your login is treated as yours, so keep the password and the phone that receives your sign-in codes to yourself.
Your phone number, and the text messages
We ask for a mobile number and send a single text message to it containing a one-time verification code, at the moment you ask for that code and never at any other moment. Pressing the button that sends the code is what asks for that one message.
The tick box beside the number is a separate agreement, and it covers three kinds of message and nothing else: a verification code when you ask for one, a reply when you text Jiclo, and the result of an errand you asked for, including one you started by phone. How often any of them arrives is decided by you. One code when you ask for one, one reply each time you text, and one message when an errand you asked for is done.
Today the code is the only one of the three that actually leaves. Jiclo has no number of its own to send from yet and the carrier registration that would give it one is not finished, so texting Jiclo gets no answer back and the result of an errand waits on your screen instead. The tick names the other two now rather than asking you again later, and when they are switched on this page will say so with a date on it. Nothing here means a message is on its way to you today.
Message and data rates may apply, and they are your carrier's charges rather than ours. Reply HELP for help. Reply STOP to stop. Stopping ends all three kinds, including the verification code, and a verified number is required before Jiclo can spend anything, so stopping and then trying to buy will not work.
We do not send marketing texts and we have no list to add you to. We do not sell or share your SMS opt-in data or personal information with third parties for marketing purposes.
Verifying a number proves that somebody on the account held that handset once. It is not treated as a password. That is why Jiclo will not buy anything over the phone: caller ID is set by the caller, so an incoming number tells us which account a call might belong to and nothing about who is speaking.
What you approve before money moves
Every account starts in the tightest setting: every purchase is a button you press, and you see the item, the all-in price and who it is going to before you press it. That is also where an account lands if we cannot tell what you chose. A setting we failed to read never resolves to "buy".
There are three settings and they mean exactly what they say.
- Ask me every time. Nothing is bought without a press.
- Let me approve a batch. One press covers a list of items you have already seen and priced on the screen. It is not a standing budget, and nothing can be added to the list after you press.
- Buy without asking. Jiclo may place an order for something you named yourself in the conversation while you are not watching, inside a per-purchase limit and a daily limit you set. Turning this on requires you to confirm, in words, that you understand the assistant can spend your balance without asking you first.
Underneath whichever setting you choose there are ceilings you do not turn off: the per-purchase limit, the daily limit, your available balance, and a daily spending cap held by the ledger itself and checked inside the transaction that places the order. A cancelled order still counts against the day it was placed in, so cancelling something and rebuying it the same day can run you into the daily cap even though the money came back.
None of this is a promise that nothing will go wrong. These are real controls, they are in the code rather than in a policy document, and they can still let through a purchase you did not want. An assistant that can act can act wrongly. That is the reason the balance is prefunded and the limits are small by default.
Your balance, and where the money actually sits
You add money to a Jiclo balance through Stripe. We record what you have added and what you have spent in a double-entry ledger, in whole cents, and that record is what we owe you.
Your balance is not held in a separate or protected account. It is not a bank account, it is not insured, and it is not segregated from our own money. There is one payment account and one payout destination. Money you add lands in the same place that pays our processing fees, funds our refunds and pays our own costs, and nothing prevents a cent you are owed being spent on something else. The ledger records the debt. It cannot stop us using the money.
What follows from that is plain: if Jiclo were to fail, you would be an ordinary unsecured creditor for whatever your balance said. Please do not keep more on a Jiclo balance than you are willing to have at risk, and do not treat it as savings.
Money you add by card is not spendable the instant you add it. Card and bank payments settle before the balance becomes available, because money that can still be pulled back is not money we can let you spend.
A balance comes back only to the payment method that funded it. There is no cash withdrawal and no way to send it to a different card, a different bank or anybody else. That is not a rule we apply case by case: the request simply has no field for a destination, and neither does the processor's. If you ask for your unspent balance back, it goes to the card or the account it came from, oldest payment first.
Money that has been on a balance for a long time gets harder to return. Past roughly six months a card refund stops being a reversal of your original payment and is pushed through the card networks as a fresh credit, which your bank can decline. We refund the oldest payment first precisely so that what is left is always the most returnable money on the account, but we cannot promise that a payment made a year ago can still be reversed. Balance credited by hand, with no payment behind it, is spendable and is not returnable at all.
We do not pay interest on a balance, and a balance is not a deposit, a stored-value instrument you can redeem for cash, or a payment service.
Prices, our margin, and plans
The price on a confirmation screen is the all-in price: what the item or the stay costs, plus shipping where it applies, plus our margin. There is no separate fee added afterwards and there is no surcharge for paying by card rather than by bank transfer.
Prices move. A price shown while you were searching can differ from the price when the supplier is actually asked to hold the item or the room, and a purchase is placed against a ceiling so that a move past it fails rather than quietly costing you more. If a supplier's price has moved beyond what you approved, the purchase does not happen.
Plans are billed monthly through Stripe. Free accounts cannot buy: the free plan is there to let you use the assistant and see what it does. Plus is $29 a month and Agency is $49 a month. Plus includes $10 of assistant usage and up to 300 requests per subscription month; Agency includes $20 and up to 2,000 requests. Both limits apply, reset with the subscription period, and do not roll over. Usage uses provider-reported costs or published-rate estimates, including temporary reservations for work in progress or costs awaiting confirmation. Past that allowance new requests stop on every plan; there are no automatic overage charges. An assistant response or scheduled task run counts as one request. Free also has a small trial usage budget. Purchases and paid generation are separate charges when enabled.
You cancel a plan in Stripe's billing portal, which you reach from your settings. Cancelling stops the next charge and leaves the plan in place until the period you have paid for ends. A month already charged is not refunded for part of a month. If a payment fails we keep your plan working for seven days while we retry, because a bounced card is usually an expired card and not a decision.
Cancelling, refunds, and who bears a supplier's fee
Two different things share the word refund and it is worth keeping them apart.
Cancelling a purchase
When you cancel an order or a booking, we ask the supplier to reverse it and we put back on your balance the same proportion of what you paid as the supplier gave back to us. A clean cancellation inside a free window returns everything, including our margin. That money is on your balance immediately and is spendable straight away.
We never absorb a cost a supplier keeps. If a hotel keeps part of the room rate, or a retailer keeps a per-order fee on a return, your refund is short by that amount in proportion. Our own margin shrinks in the same proportion, so we are not recovering the supplier's fee out of you while keeping our cut whole. But the shortfall is real, it is yours, and there are purchases where cancelling costs you money.
Free-cancellation deadlines come from the supplier and we show them with the rate, including the clock time and the timezone, because a deadline at 17:00 GMT is not a whole extra day. Where a supplier calls a rate refundable and does not say until when, or names a deadline we cannot read as a moment in time, we say we do not know rather than guessing in your favour. A rate marked non-refundable costs the full amount to change.
Getting your unspent balance back
You can ask us to return unspent balance at any time, and it goes back to the payment method that funded it under the rules in the section above. We take the money out of your balance at the moment the request is accepted, so it cannot be spent twice. We do not promise a timescale for it arriving: that part belongs to your bank.
Money committed to an order in flight is not unspent, and money already spent has gone. Cancelling the order releases it and it becomes returnable again.
When a supplier fails, or a purchase goes wrong
We placed the order, so the conversation starts with us. Tell us and we will take it up with the supplier and put right what can be put right through the ledger. We are not going to send you to a merchant and call it their problem.
What we cannot do is promise an outcome we do not control. A supplier can cancel, be out of stock after confirming, ship the wrong thing, or refuse a cancellation we asked for. Where a supplier's own terms govern a stay or a delivery, those terms apply to it, and what we can recover for you is bounded by what the supplier returns to us.
We do not promise a delivery date, and we cannot buy to meet one. Jiclo has no way to choose a shipping speed, no way to commit to an arrival day, and no way to warn you that a date will be missed. A retailer's own estimate may reach us and it is not something we pass on or stand behind. If a date matters, Jiclo is the wrong tool for that purchase.
Nothing reaches out to you today. Jiclo sends no email and no push notification, and the only text that actually leaves is your sign-in code. The agreement on the phone screen covers a text when an errand you asked for is done, and that message is not switched on yet. Until it is, you find out what happened by opening your orders or by asking in the chat, and that is the whole of it.
The assistant can also be wrong about an item. Where what a supplier confirms does not match what you picked, the confirmation screen says so before you press, and pressing anyway is your decision.
Buying and booking for other people
Jiclo can send a parcel to somebody else's address and book a room in somebody else's name. If you use it that way, you are telling us three things and we are relying on all three.
- You are entitled to give us that person's name, address, phone and email.
- They are expecting what you are sending, or you have a reason to send it.
- You will tell them what they need to know, including a cancellation deadline on a stay, because we will not be in touch with them.
We keep those details on your account so a later order can use them, and we keep them attached to the order so a shipment can always be traced. The person receiving the parcel has no account and cannot log in to see or correct what you gave us. If they ask you to remove them, write to us and we will do it by hand: there is no button for it yet.
Sending goods to addresses you have no relationship with is the mechanism of reshipping and triangulation fraud. We look at this, we will ask about it, and we will suspend an account that patterns that way.
What you may not do
Do not use Jiclo to:
- fund a balance with a card, bank account or identity that is not yours, or that you are not authorised to use;
- buy anything illegal where it is being sent, or anything the supplier's own terms forbid, including firearms, controlled substances, prescription medicines, hazardous materials and counterfeit goods;
- ship goods to people who are not expecting them, run a reshipping operation, or test payment instruments;
- try to get round a limit: sharing an account to multiply an allowance, opening accounts to repeat a free tier, or putting instructions in a document, a web page or a file so that the assistant acts on them as if they were yours;
- attack, overload, scrape or reverse engineer the product or the suppliers behind it, or automate it at a rate a person could not;
- use the SMS path for anything but your own number and your own conversation with Jiclo, or send us numbers that are not yours.
The fourth one is worth reading twice. Putting a purchase instruction where the assistant will read it as though you had said it is the single attack this product is built against, and doing it deliberately is a breach of these terms as well as something the code refuses.
Suspension, and closing your account
We can suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, that we reasonably believe is being used fraudulently, or that a supplier, a processor or a regulator requires us to stop serving. Where we can tell you why, we will. Where telling you would defeat the point, we will not.
A suspension stops new purchases. It does not cancel orders already with a supplier, and it does not take money off your balance. If we close an account with money on it, we return the unspent balance to the payment method that funded it, under the same rules and the same limits as any other refund.
You can stop using Jiclo at any time. Ask us to return your balance first: closing an account is not a way of getting money back and a closed account is harder for us to refund, not easier.
What you write, and what we do with it
What you type, upload, dictate and generate stays yours. You give us permission to use it for the purpose you gave it to us for: to answer you, to read a file you asked about, to place an order you asked for, and to keep the transcript so the conversation still makes sense tomorrow.
That permission includes sending it to a model provider, because that is how the assistant works. Your messages, the text of any file the assistant reads and the pictures it opens go to our model provider so they can be answered. Each of those requests carries an instruction that it may only be handled by a provider that does not keep your prompts and does not train on them, and is refused rather than sent if none is available. The privacy policy names who the provider is, sets out that constraint and names the one path it cannot be put on.
The product itself, its interface, its name and its code are ours. Using Jiclo does not give you a licence to any of it beyond using the product.
What we do not promise
Jiclo is early software and it is provided as it is. We do not warrant that it will be available, that it will be correct, that a search will find the best price, that a supplier will honour what it showed us, or that the assistant will understand what you meant.
We do implement safeguards, and the sections above describe them honestly rather than vaguely: a default that asks every time, ceilings checked under a lock at the moment of spending, a rule that content cannot start a purchase, a gate in front of every action that leaves the building. We are not going to tell you those safeguards do not exist in order to be safer in a dispute. Nor will we tell you they are sufficient. They can fail, and an assistant that acts in the world can act wrongly inside every limit you set.
Limits on what we owe you
Your balance is not capped and never will be. What the ledger says you are owed, you are owed. We will not use a liability limit to avoid returning money you put on an account, and a clause attempting that would be a clause written to take your money.
For everything else, and to the extent the law allows: our total liability to you for any claim arising from these terms or from using Jiclo is limited to the greater of the fees you paid us in the six months before the claim, and one hundred dollars. We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for lost profit, or for a loss caused by a supplier's own failure beyond what we can recover from that supplier for you.
Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law, including for fraud or for death or personal injury caused by negligence.
When you cover us
You will cover us for claims, losses and reasonable costs arising from you breaking the rules in "What you may not do", from details you gave us about somebody else that you were not entitled to give, and from what somebody does with goods you had us send to them. That is the whole of it. We are not asking you to indemnify us for our own mistakes.
Governing law and disputes
These terms and related non-contractual obligations are governed by Delaware law, United States. The courts of the State of Delaware have exclusive jurisdiction, except where mandatory law provides otherwise. Consumers in the European Union or United Kingdom keep the mandatory protections of their home country and may bring proceedings in its courts.
Jiclo is operated by Spotbo, Inc., a Delaware corporation trading as VCorp Holdings. Its registered office is 1111B S Governors Ave STE 29027, Dover, DE 19904, United States. Send legal notices to [email protected].
We do not currently require arbitration and we do not ask you to waive a class action. If that changes it will change here, with a date on it, and it will not be applied to anything that happened before.
Changes to these terms
We will change this document. When we do, the version and the date at the top change with it and the first section says what moved.
We have no way to tell you. Jiclo sends no email and no push notification, and the texts you agreed to on the phone screen answer you or report an errand rather than announce a change to a document, so there is no notice we could honestly promise to give you. This page and its date are the notice. When we build a way to reach people, we will use it for exactly this, and this paragraph will change to say so.
A change does not apply backwards. An order you placed, and money already on your balance, are governed by the version that was here at the time.
How to reach us
Write to [email protected]. It reaches a person and a person answers it. You can also ask in the chat inside the product, which is where support lives for every account.
See also our privacy policy. Questions about anything on this page go to [email protected], and a person answers them.